Murphy says as I join him in St. Aggie’s computer lab the next morning. “Skyla’s frenemies are nothing if not creative in their insults,” I say, snorting in amusement as I hop up to sit on the table across from him. Brindle-coated. I can’t even take that seriously. The other two posts Skyla’s antagonizers wrote about me were equally asinine. But the creepy part I can’t laugh off is that the posters knew Skyla had met with me so soon after the fact. Hence our campout in St. Aggie’s computer lab. We’re starting the job with a Trojan horse scam to see if we can breach the Internet trolls’ defenses through their personal computers. That’s right—good old-fashioned spyware, baby. God bless governments and creepy corporations. Ms. Shirley, the computer science teacher and chief overlord of the lab, thinks we’re conducting a research experiment on Internet surfing patterns. She has no idea we’re actually planting hacker bugs into the computers, phones, and tablets of a couple dozen of Skyla’s closest friends, so we can monitor every click and swipe they make over the next few days.
